This invention relates to a method and apparatus for utilizing the Baudot code to identify and categorize different kinds of information and for selectively distributing the information, dependent upon its categorization, to various utilization units or destinations, such as channels of a multiple television system.
New wire services have for years distributed news information from central locations to numerous wire service subscribers over the telephone network or other transmission facilities. Such news information, for example, is distributed on a substantially continuous basis to subscribing newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. The news information is transmitted in series with the various kinds of news stories, such as sports, world news, national news, financial and business news, etc., being intermixed. Fairly recently, cable television systems have begun to subscribe to the news wire services and to make available to their subscribers one or more television channels used principally for displaying the latest news information as received from the wire services. Of course, the news displayed would be an intermix of the news received from the news wire services unless some type of editing were performed by the cable system operator prior to distribution to the subscribers.
It has been found desirable by cable system operators to offer to subscribers more channels dedicated to displaying specific kinds or categories of news such as stock price information, weather news, etc. One way of offering this service would be for the cable sytem operator to provide a person or persons to monitor the news as it was received from the wire services and then regenerate this news in the categories desired for distribution to the cable sytem subscribers. Of course, this would be expensive and would create a delay in getting the information to the subscribers.
An alternative suggestion for distributing different categories of news over certain dedicated television channels has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,909,818. In the system disclosed in this reference, news information received from various sources is purportedly edited in some fashion by a general purpose digital computer and then distributed to various television channels depending upon the nature of the news. It could be expected that the separation of news information according to subject matter by some type of computer processing of the news texts would be quite complicated and costly and subject to error in accurately delimiting the different subject matter.